Written by

Taya Flores and David Smith

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About this report

In the past several decades the number of babies born to unmarried parents has skyrocketed, nationally and locally. In this report, the Journal & Courier takes a closer look at this issue and what it means for families and the community. Stories:• Profiles of three unwed moms and an overview of the issue. • A look at changes in social norms and economic status as they affect the upward trend in nonmarital childbirths. • Perspectives from two Greater Lafayette moms going it alone. • Princeton University sociologist Sara McLanahan offers her unique perspective as principal investigator of a landmark study, “Fragile Families and Children Wellbeing.” Graphics:• A demographic profile of Greater Lafayette’s unwed mothers • Nonmarital births • Child poverty

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As a young girl, Treecee Arnett says, she dreamed of her wedding day.

She envisioned a fairy tale event in a large church adorned with ice sculptures and royal blue and cream decorations. She would wear an open back dress with a tiara.

Arnett has yet to realize that dream.

“I haven’t found the right one,” the Lafayette woman said. “Some of them do have the potential to be great husbands, but they are caught up in that ‘thug’ life.”

As marriage plans failed to materialize, motherhood did not wait. Arnett’s first child came when she was 16. Now 35, she’s a single mother of and sole provider for three teens. Her children have three different fathers, none of whom is involved in his kids’ lives.

“I do have a child support order on them, but they are not paying support,” she said.

Arnett’s family situation — and the pressures it brings to bear on providing everything from food and clothing to making sure her children get a good education — is more common than many might realize.

In Arnett’s lifetime, the percentage of children born to unmarried women has more than doubled, from 15.5 percent of births in 1977 to 40.7 percent in 2011, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics. As recently as 1960, the percentage of nonmarital births in the United States was just 5 percent.

For women younger than 25, having a child outside marriage is the norm. In Tippecanoe County, 69 percent of women ages 15 to 24 who gave birth were not married, according to data for the years 2007 through 2010.

Nonmarital births pose many challenges, and not just for single parents and their children. Tippecanoe County public and private agencies dedicated to helping families are witnessing a rising tide of single-parent households and, along with it, childhood poverty.

To get a handle on what’s happening, Lafayette Urban Ministry, a nonprofit social service agency supported by 40 Greater Lafayette congregations, recently invited Sarah Mustillo, an associate professor of sociology at Purdue University, to give presentations to its board and affiliated pastors.

“We are very concerned that the good, stable, healthy family is really coming loose, so we want to try to understand why it is that so many children are being born to single parents,” Micon said. “Hopefully, the outcome of that conversation will be improved programs and services to low-income families.”

An oft-cited research paper by Larry Bumpass and Hsien-Hen Lu at the University of Wisconsin published in 2000 in Population Studies noted that single-parent families were “an inescapable fact of American family life, with half of all children spending at least some time in such families.”

The article cited consequences for children of single parents: more likely to do poorly in school, enter sexual activity earlier, have premarital births, cohabit or marry early and experience the disruption of their own marriages and experience poverty.

More recently, a study of 5,000 births in 20 U.S. cities found that by age 5, children born to unmarried mothers were more prone to obesity and asthma. They were more likely to exhibit behaviors linked to adolescent depression and delinquency, and and their scores on cognitive tests were lower.

Sara McLanahan, a Princeton University sociologist and principal investigator in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, said many of the negatives associated with nonmarital births can be attributed to family instability.

The study found that by the child’s fifth year, 65 percent of unmarried parents were no longer together, compared with 20 percent of married parents. In more than half the unmarried births, the mother experienced at least one change in residential partnership, defined as “either a move in or a move out by a romantic partner.”

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Such instability can have a negative impact on the child’s and mother’s health.

“Instability also undermines the quality of the home environment by diverting the mother’s attention away from the child and creating uncertainty over parental authority,” she wrote in a 2012 research briefing to the National Academy of Sciences. The findings also are discussed in a chapter McLanahan co-authored in a 2012 book, “Marriage at the Crossroads.”

Interviews with mothers five years after birth showed unmarried moms had spent less time reading to their children, and their children’s scores on vocabulary tests reflected that.

Significantly, while being interviewed for the Fragile Families study, unmarried mothers were more likely to use harsh discipline — scolding or slapping the child in front of the interviewer — than were married mothers.

The great divide

Mustillo, the Purdue sociologist, said the trend of having babies outside marriage is largely divided among socioeconomic lines. Married parents tend to have more education and therefore more earning power, according to CDC data and the Fragile Families study.

And race magnifies that disparity. For black women, in particular, Mustillo noted, the lack of “marriageable” men likely elevates the percentage of babies outside marriage.

“Black men are less likely to complete high school than black women, white women or white men (and) more likely to be unemployed and more likely to experience incarceration,” she said.

In 2010, the most recent year for which county-level data are available, 76.5 percent of births to African-American women in Tippecanoe County occurred outside marriage, compared with 35.6 percent of births to white, non-Hispanic women, according to the Indiana State Department of Health.

In general, however, the birth rate for unmarried black women has been dropping in recent years while the birth rate for unmarried white women has been climbing. The birth rate is the number of births per 1,000 women.

While county-level data are unavailable, the CDC lists national birth rates by race annually. The nonmarital birth rate for black women was 65.3 births per 1,000 unmarried black women in 2010, down 28 percent from 1990. The unmarried birth rate for white, non-Hispanic women in 2010 was 32.9 births per 1,000, up 35 percent.

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Poverty on upswing

Poverty is more common among unmarried parent households, a characteristic true of both single parents and cohabiting parents.

The Fragile Families study, which focused on 5,000 births in 20 cities nationwide around 2000, found that unmarried single women were three times more likely to be living in poverty than their married counterparts. Cohabiting women were twice as likely to be living in poverty.

Unmarried parents were much less likely to have a college degree or to have finished high school — factors directly related to earning potential.

Such findings have a special relevancy for Tippecanoe County, where family poverty has risen sharply since 1998.

In 1998, 12 percent of the county’s younger than 18 population was living in poverty, which at that time was 7 percentage points below the U.S. child poverty rate.

By 2010, the child poverty rate in Tippecanoe County had risen to 20.1 percent, less than 2 percentage points below the U.S. rate, according to the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates data.

The number of children living in poverty countywide during that time nearly doubled, from 3,548 children in 1998 to 7,061 children in 2010. The 99 percent increase in children in poverty occurred as the county’s overall population grew 19.5 percent.

Meanwhile, the number of children born to unmarried parents in Tippecanoe County grew 82 percent, from 442 in 1998 to 808 in 2010, according to Indiana State Department of Health data.

Micon said he believes factors in addition to marital status are contributing to the increase in poverty. Those factors include a loss of good-paying jobs — a decline that affects families of all types.

Indeed, of the Tippecanoe County children living at or below the federal poverty threshold of $22,050 for a family of four in 2010, 45 percent lived in two-parent households, according to the Census Bureau.

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Dream still alive

Arnett makes minimum wage working part-time at McDonald’s. She also receives food assistance and lives in subsidized housing. The fathers of her children are not paying child support, she said.

She tried making her way up the income ladder by attending Ivy Tech Community College in Lafayette in 2011 to study criminal justice. “I always wanted to go to college because I wanted to be a probation officer, and as my kids got older I decided it was time for me to go,” she said.

But it was too expensive. So after about a year, she left to find employment in order to support her family.

Arnett said she has learned from her mistakes. “I’m not so quick to jump into a relationship. I take my time with that. I’m working towards my goal of opening my own restaurant one day.”

And waiting for that dream wedding to happen.

“I still want to be married,” she said. “That’s another lifelong goal of mine — to be married.”